Research Engineer, Content Understanding for Scalable Search

Wwshemi; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine at web scale. We design massive infrastructure, train state-of-the-art embedding models, and deploy high-performance vector databases.

We are seeking a backend engineer to contribute to our search architecture and push the boundaries of what is possible in information retrieval. You will work on parsing, page classification, quality judgments, and deduplication, applying ML at scale while tackling open-ended problems like credibility and

Qualifications

• Graduate-level ML experience (Master's or PhD with at least 2 years of relevant experience), or an exceptionally strong undergrad
• You can build a transformer from scratch in PyTorch, and you have trained models that then had to be cheap enough to run everywhere
• You like building large-scale datasets and living in the data. Most of the wins here are in the supervision rather than the architecture
• You are comfortable with problems where the ground truth does not exist yet and defining it is part of the job
• You care about the problem of finding high quality knowledge and recognize how important this is for the world

Responsibilities

• Make parsing work on pages where it currently does not and prove the improvement
• Teach a model to judge page quality and get everyone to agree on what quality means
• Work on credibility and misinformation as a modelling problem: what a page claims, source reliability, and whether it was written for a reader or for a crawler
• Decide whether two documents are semantically the same or different to deduplicate the web without collapsing pages a user would want to see separately
• Build classification and extraction that is accurate at web scale and cheap enough to run on all of it
• Design supervision for something nobody has labels for and determine if it is learnable
• Trace a bad search result back to the page-level prediction and fix it at the source

Skills

ML experience

Transformer models

Dataset construction

Model evaluation

Problem formulation

Education

Master's or PhD in ML/CS

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine at web scale. We design massive infrastructure, train state-of-the-art embedding models, and deploy high-performance vector databases.

We are seeking a backend engineer to contribute to our search architecture and push the boundaries of what is possible in information retrieval. You will work on parsing, page classification, quality judgments, and deduplication, applying ML at scale while tackling open-ended problems like credibility and